Repeat after me boys and girls: ALWAYS CHECK THE CABLES FIRST I've been troubleshooting skipping music in the cinema this afternoon - of course I search the symptoms and go down a rabbit hole... is it the CI580 Player? Is it BluOS? Is it Tidal? Could be a network issue? This esoteric setting on the CI580 that I didn't even know about for the DAC? No, its the $%&@# optical cable. Sheesh
Hopefully not an expensive secret sauce optical cable. I'm sure I've seen optical cables with gold plated ends... That really must help a lot
Amazon order history says £3.43 Possibly too cheap, as its only been in for 2 years. Its replacement was £7, and also has said inexplicable gold plated ends - "corrosion resistant gold plating keeps connectors clean" apparently. There's red coming out the other side of the cable, I assume there's an internal break/kink that's making the bits taste funny. What's odd is that its in the back of a rack that's largely untampered with - I don't recall anything changing between today and the last time this room played music. Cable gnomes probably... dicks.
This is moderately interesting. - Comparison of bitrate for streaming content, and tells me what I already suspected to be true though never actually verified: Amazon lags well behind the pack. Its not super scientific and has different content on some platforms out of necessity But TLDW: - Apple/iTunes: 25-30Mbps average, 30-40Mbps peak, 770Kbps Atmos > Disney = HBO = Netflix > Paramount > Amazon: 14Mbps average, 17Mbps peak, 192Kbps 5.1 (for content that indicated Atmos) There are a few films I've bought/rented on iTunes in spite of them being included on Prime for this reason - John Wick 4 at the weekend for instance, and no pixel-peeping needed for the difference between the two versions. I'll still watch physical (ripped) content where I've got it, but whilst iTunes is half the video bitrate (and a fraction the audio bitrate) of that, in practice I don't find it lags that far behind, especially for the convenience. The difference certainly isn't anything remotely close to enough to warrant the cost of Kaleidescape.
I was about to say those bitrates are ridiculously inaccurate for music, when it suddenly dawned on me, that you’re talking about video.
That's re-assuring to know. I do tend to buy films on Apple Movies when I buy digital content; it's always "looked" like superior quality, so it's nice to see some numbers for that. [qucikly googles Kaleidescape] lolnope
Have YOU ever wanted to pay £30k for a 4-bay NAS?! Have we got the product for you! To be fair to them it’s not about the hardware and there’s a market for it clearly. I’m just not in it.
Many times over the decades I’ve been on the merry-go-round of “Jesus, that’s expensive! I can DIY something that does thing for a fraction of the cost!” These days however I am very much of the opinion that while I almost certainly can DIY something to do the same job, in doing so I could be giving myself a massive ongoing headache in terms of maintenance, updates, etc. Sometimes it really is worth putting your hand in your pocket to pay for a quality product and making better use of your free time. Of course there’s value in doing something for the sake of doing it, or in order to learn something new, or simply because you enjoy it. But these days I really have to question what it is I’m going to get from doing it; if I just want something that does a practical job at the end of it then I’m more likely just to pay for something that does the same thing out of the box. Especially when it comes to home media streaming/local playback. Having said that… I, also, cannot ever see myself being in the market for a $30,000 package comprising a 31TB SSD media server and 2x clients! Or even their cheapest option of $8,000 for 1x client and an 8TB (rust spinner) server!
I'm completely with you - there's always that make vs buy threshold though. I'd love a Kaleidescape system but for now I'm slumming it with Plex, which has annoyingly started to self-destruct every couple of weeks due to consuming all of the memory on the server. For $90k they will even supply a 176TB system with their entire movie library licensed and pre-loaded for your yacht, which gives you an idea of the target audience.
I started spec’ing out an absolutely overkill media server. About £8,500 got me an Epyc 7002 24C/48T CPU, suitable motherboard with 2x10gig ports, 8x32GB of DR4 ECC registered RAM, and 15x 3.84TB enterprise U.2 SSDs (3x ZFS RAID-Z1 groups of 5 drives each, 32TB of usable space (accounting for 20% free space limit)). You’d have to go fibre optic networking before you’d stress the bandwidth of the array, more than enough for multiple clients pulling uncompressed video.
I bunged the guys £30 to bring them all the way up and I am glad I did. Nearly 60 kilos of pure mass. I need to extend my rocket cables slightly, so I need to wait til I come back with the solder tools and shrink etc. I don't want to spend £300 on stands either, and I don't really want them tlted either. I need to measure them up, then order these in the perfect height. Bonus is they are cheap AF, too. And with the rubber things removed you can put a spike in there.
Dammit. You beat me to the Hoover + Ghost speakers punch. @Vault-Tec - probably a daft question, but won't drilling screw holes in your new expensive kit ruin it (albeit slightly) if you ever dismount them at a later date? Or have I completely misunderstood?
